Lessons NZ's news media from hard times for Vice and Buzzfeed

As two pillars of 2010s digital news optimism face oblivion, Stuff launches paywalls for much of its best work.

Mōrena and welcome to The Bulletin for Friday, May 5 by Duncan Greive. Presented in partnership with Z Energy.

In today’s edition: UK Free trade comes into force at the end of May; vaccination issues at an Auckland school with a measles outbreak and a scoop involving education attendance data. But first, the connection between struggles at two major digital news outlets and a big change at our biggest employer of journalists.

The humbling of the social media news giants

If you wanted to pick a moment when the last digital news era definitively ended, the last couple of weeks will take some beating. First, Buzzfeed announced the closure of its award-winning Buzzfeed News operation. The Guardian reported that founder Jonah Peretti told staff “I made the decision to overinvest in BuzzFeed News because I love their work and mission so much. This made me slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media.” Then, earlier this week, even more troubling news about a second digital titan. The New York Times reported that Vice, valued at US$5.7bn as recently as 2017, is considering bankruptcy. 

The irony is inescapable. Buzzfeed and Vice were the brash internet upstarts, businesses which understood the fundamental dynamics of online media in a way that newspaper publishers like NZME and the New York Times never could. Now those fusty old newspapers are running on digital subscription revenue, and reporting on the demise of the once-vital social media-driven news brands. All this is happening because Facebook and Twitter are now wildly different platforms, and have become, on some level hostile to news media. The commercial revenue which supported sites like Vice and Buzzfeed got stuck further up the distribution pipe.

What does that mean for New Zealand?

This is the backdrop to Stuff’s launch last week of paywalls tied to three of its most important historic newspaper mastheads: The Press, The Post and the Waikato Times. The company’s head of content, former Press editor Jo Norris, explained the company’s thinking on my podcast The Fold. “We have a mix of revenue, which means that we are a long-term sustainable company. But it’s important that we do continue to diversify, and that we grow our revenue from digital subscribers.” She was being diplomatic. A recent Adweek feature covering the struggles of Buzzfeed noted that “newsgathering is too expensive, and its digital ad yields too paltry, for such a product to survive on advertising revenue alone.” (A shameless but necessary plug: this is also why The Spinoff can only operate with the continued support of members. Please support us if you can).

The fragility of publishing in New Zealand is surely well-understood by now. The 2020 collapse of Bauer Media, with all those magazine titles, was clear evidence. So too the brutal shutdown of Today FM after just a year on air. Just this morning the Herald reports that 16 roles are being considered for elimination at Stuff. Funding any kind of professional news brand on advertising alone is becoming impossible. That was the context behind the now-abandoned merger of TVNZ and RNZ, and the complexity of creating news for digital audiences is why RNZ has been handed $25m a year, in part to bolster its digital news operation. 

Trust issues

AUT reseracher Merja Myllylahti wrote for Newsroom about the the difficulties and audience mistrust associated with the government’s Public Interest Journalism Fund, which shows that subsidies will always be complex when applied to news. So far the government’s attempts to get tech companies to pay for news have made little meaningful progress. Fundamentally, the fading out of Vice and Buzzfeed News is connected to the same forces driving much of Stuff’s journalism behind its new paywalls. The net outcome is that the amount and quality of freely accessible journalism is diminishing. And while there are entrepreneurs investing in the space, my reporting over the past year suggests they are more likely to reflect the interests of their funders and exist on a spectrum from centre right-leaning, to corrosive to outright conspiracist – further altering the type of public conversation we are likely to have in this country. 

A tectonic shift in the digital news environment

There is an argument that this is not a problem. This newsletter shows each day that there is still a lot of great journalism made in New Zealand, much of it paywalled at the NZ Herald, Stuff’s new sites, along with BusinessDesk, the NBR and more. A bunch of good work remains freely accessible – note news of Meka Whaitiri’s defection was broken by Whakaata Māori. Still, across the five years The Bulletin has been published, paywalls have gone from a local rarity to the norm. This is why the struggles of Buzzfeed and Vice have real relevance here. The end of ad-supported news media and the rapid rise of paywalls is clear evidence that the nature of digital news is changing fast – and that audiences will increasingly have to pay to fund it, and even access it, in future.

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UK free trade deal into force on May 31

Katie Scotcher reports for RNZ that PM Chris Hipkins has announced that a major free trade agreement with the UK will come into force at the end of the mont. The deal will eventually eliminate all tariffs between the two countries, and is predicted to add $1bn to New Zealand’s GDP. "The UK is New Zealand's seventh largest trading partner and a crucial market for some of our key exports, so this should really help our economic recovery," said Hipkins. His counterpart, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the FTA marked a "new chapter" in the relationship between the UK and New Zealand. "This deal will unlock new opportunities for businesses and investors across New Zealand and the UK, drive growth, boost jobs, and most importantly build a more prosperous future for the next generation.”

A call timed for the coronation, to face up to colonisation

A day after recruiting a Labour minister, the NZ Herald reports that Te Pāti Māori has added its name to a list of signatories of a joint statement from indigenous, first nations and republican groups asking King Charles to acknowledge the impacts of colonisation. ​​“We, the undersigned, call on the British Monarch, King Charles III, on the date of his coronation being May 6, 2023, to acknowledge the horrific impacts on and legacy of genocide and colonisation of the indigenous and enslaved peoples,” the statement reads.

Education officials admit to delaying data release to coincide with government announcement

Newshub has a scoop showing education minister Jan Tinetti’s office asked officials for a lengthy delay in the release of official attendance data to coincide with fresh government work around truancy. Tinetti told the house "I can categorically tell that Member that the Ministry of Education is responsible for the data. I have no say over that." Yet emails obtained under the Official Information Act showed attendance data was ready last December, but the minister delayed the release, asking for more information. Then in February, Tinetti's office told officials to release the data only after her upcoming truancy announcement had been made. While Tinetti maintains she has not been caught in a lie, National education spokesperson Erica Stanford disagrees, and Tinetti has been forced to correct her record in the House.

An unexpected tax hole arising from the clean car rebate

BusinessDesk’s Brent Melville reports on complexities arising from the success of the government’s clean car rebate. He cites Stats NZ data showing EV imports up 127% in the year to March 2023. However that success has come at a cost, and to balance the scheme fees on higher emissions vehicles have increased, while the rebate on EVs has diminished. One previously under-reported wrinkle of the scheme is its impact on government revenue from fuel excise taxes. The cars will save drivers $325m a year, according to the AA, leaving the government down $156m in tax revenue.

Click and collect

• Stuff reports that one in five students at Auckland school at the centre of a measles outbreak was not vaccinated against the virus

• Green MP Elizabeth Kerekere will address the party as selection deadline looms, with bullying allegations still unresolved, via The Spinoff live updates

• Stuff’s Dana Johanssen has a superb and coruscating op-ed covering the decision of America’s Cup organisers – “essentially Team NZ with different email signatures” – choosing Saudi Arabia as a location for a pre-regatta later this year, despite the state’s appalling human rights record

• The Spinoff’s Shanti Mathias reports on a new study showing the extent of anti-trans hate online following the Posie Parker protests in March.

Got some feedback about The Bulletin, or anything in the news? Get in touch with me at thebulletin@thespinoff.co.nz.

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Right now on The Spinoff

Today on The Spinoff: An absolute must-read oral history from Alex Casey, examining the backstory of ‘We Gon’ Ride’, the apex of New Zealand hip hop’s mid-’00s explosion. Hayden Donnell searches, fruitlessly, for the charity allegedly advising Chris Bishop on National's new no-cause eviction policy. Jules Older does a survey about how New Zealanders read now – are treebooks still in? And Hera Lindsay Bird has some advice about how everyone can have the confidence of white men with a podcast, of which yours truly is a prime example.

Sporting snippets

• Less than three months’ out from the women’s world cup, screening rights deals are yet to be signed in major European markets including the UK, France and Germany. FIFA is threatening a blackout if larger fee offers aren’t forthcoming. Stuff has the story, via the AP.

• RNZ reports prickly former All Black coach John Mitchell has been named coach of England’s women’s rugby side.

• NZ Herald has a fascinating story about how the return of 47-year-old Football Ferns great Maia Jackson to Western Springs turned a 5-0 victory into defeat, despite her spending just nine minutes on the park.

‘The hardest part about defecting to the Maori Party may be yet to come for Whaitiri.’

The NZ Herald’s longtime political editor Audrey Young ceded that role to the excellent Claire Trevett in 2021, but is still the paper’s senior political correspondent. It means she writes less frequency, but can linger over her work in a way which often produces an extra layer of reflection and texture. That’s very much the case with this superb analysis of what might lie ahead for Meka Whaitiri – it comes a day later, but in calling to mind her motives for entering politics in the first place, the lives of her whānau and the complexities of moving to a more radical party, it gives an original perspective on the situation that could have come from no one else.